


Cowboy Boots To The Revolution

by violentdarlings



Category: Z Nation (TV)
Genre: Fem!Murphy, Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Rule 63
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-09
Updated: 2018-05-09
Packaged: 2019-05-04 11:25:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14592003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/violentdarlings/pseuds/violentdarlings
Summary: Rule 63, because women have just as much of a right to be assholes as men do.





	Cowboy Boots To The Revolution

**Author's Note:**

> Title paraphrased from a quote by Naomi Wolf.
> 
> Alt S01E01.

Roberta puts her hand on the hilt of her sword and stares the man down. “Why should we believe a word you say?” she asks Hammond, fresh out of pleasantries and moving into the vicinity of pissed off.

Hammond just glares back, the scar around his eye twitching, before he switches his attention to Murphy. “Get out of the car,” he tells her. Murphy makes no move to do so. Roberta catches the other woman’s eye, just for a moment, before Murphy looks away, tousled black hair falling forward to hide her face. “Show them,” Hammond fumes, and none too gently drags Murphy out of the truck. The hackles rise on the back of Roberta’s neck. “Show them why you’re so damn important!”

“Get your hands off me,” Murphy snarls, and recoils when Hammond reaches for the hem of her shirt. “If you try to take my top off so help me God –”

“Just do it,” Hammond says acerbically, yet despite it he sounds so weary that Roberta can’t help but be sorry for him. “Not like you’ve got much left under there.”

Murphy flinches, just barely, and lifts her ragged black sweatshirt up enough for Roberta to see her chest. And holy hell, it’s horrific, multiple healing wounds like gouges straight out of the skin, one particularly nasty one below the rib cage and chunks taken out of one breast like the tender flesh has been gnawed on. Jesus.

Garnett mutters something like an oath and turns away. Too much of a gentleman to ogle a shirtless woman, even if her torso looks like something an alien’s burst out of. But Roberta ain’t a man or gentle besides; she looks because to look away would be cruel, like acknowledging her eyes had glimpsed something that Roberta could not bear to see.

“What happened?” she asks, her own voice fainter than usual, and for all that Murphy’s mangled skin is laid bare, all Roberta can see is the other woman looking away, staring determinedly at the ground, as if trying to pretend none of this is happening.

“Zombie bites. Eight of them,” Hammond replies, and Murphy pulls down her shirt, although Roberta can still see the terrible wounds if she closes her eyes, as if they’ve been imprinted into the back of her skull.

“Why is she still alive?” Roberta asks.

“And not a zombie,” Garnett adds, recovered now the womenfolk can be considered decently covered.  (It’s not bitterness. Just tiredness, from too many years at war.) His hands are steady on his rifle as he raises it. Roberta wonders how steady her own might be.

“Hey,” Hammond soothes, his hands rising as if to calm them like spooked horses. “She was given the only dose of an experimental vaccine right before she was bitten.”

“Those undead bastards got two of my ribs,” Murphy puts in, without rancour. She points to the spot where, underneath her clothes, the bluish, macerated wound rests.

“Shut up, at least you’re still alive,” Hammond tells her, his voice biting. Whenever he talks to her he gets angry again, Roberta notes absently. Granted, Murphy can be an exasperating son of a bitch, but still. Ain’t exactly right. “You’re looking at the only human known to have survived being bitten by a zombie. Her blood carries the antibodies to the ZN1 virus. If we can get her to the lab in California, they can use her blood and make more of the vaccine.” Roberta eyes him and Murphy both.

A vaccine. A cure. An end to all this insanity. And Murphy, her light eyes inscrutable, like she’s learnt to hide everything behind a veil of mistrust, a veneer of disdain. Dirty and scowling, her black hair short and choppy and falling into her face, taller even than Roberta and hunched in on herself like she’s trying to make herself smaller, a less obvious target.

A year on the run, travelling with men. Men at the end of their rope, desperate, who might not see anything wrong with bartering away a night’s company with a prisoner for food or gas, no matter how precious her blood is. Men who wouldn’t shy away from taking what they wanted from a woman, regardless of how scarred she might be underneath her clothes. Hammond certainly hadn’t seemed too likely to be gentle with her, given how roughly he yanked her out of the truck. Wearing a uniform ain’t no promise of a decent man underneath, hasn’t the Apocalypse taught Roberta that by now?

Roberta shifts on her feet, considering, which of course is when everything goes straight to hell.


End file.
